Lillian Alling (5 page)
I was so surprised to see that woman there. She was so scantily clad and had no firearms or anything to see her through that country. She was about five foot five and thin as a wisp. When I first saw her, she was wearing running shoes. She had a knapsack with a half-dozen sandwiches in it, some tea and some other odds and ends, a comb and personal effects, but no make-up. I had a time getting her name; she wasn't going to say anything to anybody. But I finally got it, and when she said she was going to Siberia, I couldn't say anything. I thought she was out of her mind.
5
Lillian came back to Hazelton with Wyman without protest. Once there, Wyman called his superior, Sergeant William J. Service, at Smithers, which is about 50 miles (80 kilometres) southeast of Hazelton. Although Lillian's English was good, Wyman found it difficult to get information out of her.
“Feed her and see if she'll talk,” said Service.
6
Then he suggested they charge her with vagrancy in order to save her life from the upcoming winter.
7
Wyman recalled in his interview with Stainsby that Lillian had finally told him that she had come to New York City from Russia, but she would not tell him why she had come. He also remembered that she had told him she had been a maid in New York and after she realized it was impossible to save for a steamer ticket fare back to Russia, she looked at the maps of North America in the public library and decided to walk.
8
“She was the most determined person I'd ever met,” Wyman said.
9
The only record of Lillian's arrest I was able to find was in a 1941 issue of
True Magazine
, a journal that published outdoor adventure stories for men. As part of an illustration on one page of the story, there is a photographic copy of Lillian's arrest record. The archivist at the Brown University Library, where I located this issue of
True
, said the magazine was too fragile to photograph, but he was able to photocopy it for me. The arrest record is for
Rex v. Lillian Alling
of Winnipeg, Manitoba. This was the first official, written record I found in which Lillian had stated her last residence as Winnipeg.
Wyman and Service decided to lay a vagrancy charge against Lillian, so the next day, Wednesday, September 21, she was brought into Provincial Police Court in Hazelton in front of William Grant, a local Justice of the Peace.
10
The charge reads that Lillian Alling, “not having any visible means of subsistence, was found unlawfully wandering around at 30 Mile, Yukon Telegraph Line in the County of Prince Rupert.” The report form goes on to say that she was arrested and placed in the Hazelton lockup by Constable G. Wyman. However, there was one problem with charging her with vagrancyâshe had twenty dollars on her person and was therefore not a vagrant. Fortunately, it was then discovered that she had an iron bar concealed in her clothing, and Justice of the Peace Grant was able to charge her with carrying a concealed weapon.
In the 1920s, policing was in transition in British Columbia. In 1919 the North West Mounted Police, forerunner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, had replaced the Dominion Police in the four western provinces as the enforcers of federal laws. They were responsible for such jurisdictions as Indian Affairs; Immigration; Customs and Excise; and War Measures.
In 1924 the British Columbia Provincial Police, formed in 1871, took over the responsibility for enforcing many of the federal statutes as well as provincial laws. With this change in status, the Provincial Police, who had worn civilian clothes to this date, were finally issued uniforms. This change was not without controversy, however, because some members were concerned that the uniforms made the police less approachable by the public. In 1950 the British Columbia Provincial Police were merged with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Wyman recalled:
[S]he stood silent through the hearing. Grant explained the charge to her and told her, if she wanted to say anything on her behalf, she only had to swear on the Bible to tell the truth. She stood mute. He explained it again, a third, a fourth time. Lillian finally did speak, four loud clear words, astonishing in their obscenity.
11
Grant, with great forbearance, found her guilty only of the [carrying a concealed weapon] charge and not the contempt of court which she had committed. He fined her the abnormally heavy amount, for that time and place, of $25 and $1.75 for costs, with the alternative of two months in Oakalla Prison Farm in Vancouver.
12
Wyman's 1963 account is backed up by his original report with only a small discrepancy in the court costs; his 1927 report stated that Lillian pled not guilty but was found guilty and fined twenty-five dollars plus seventy-five cents in court costs or two months in Oakalla.
Apparently Lillian said nothing more in court.
13
Bill Kilpatrick, grandson of William Grant, says that the tale of Lillian and her encounter with his grandfather has been passed down through the generations. “My grandad put her in jail so she wouldn't freeze to death,” said Bill.
14
After Lillian had been put in the Hazelton jail, another police officer, Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman T.E.E. (Ern) Greenfield, was called in to assist Constable Wyman. In a letter to the
Province
newspaper, published on May 2, 1973, Greenfield recalled that:
Constable Wyman had to go out of town on an urgent matter and he asked me to do the gaol guard duty until his return. I happened to be in Hazelton on patrol duties and it was not infrequent that members of the R.C. Mounted Police were asked and readily gave the necessary assistance to the provincial police.
He then described Lillian's appearance the first time he saw her.
Lillian's effects consisted of a man's heavy cloth overcoat that hung to ankle length in which she slept. She carried an iron bar about sixteen inches long for defence purposes. She had a landing card showing her arrival at New York early in 1927 and showing her to be Polish. Her name on the card was spelled Ailing. She wore a pair of men's eight-inch top boots.
Greenfield's recollections do not correlate with other known facts. The landing card issued in New York could not have been dated early in 1927 because her entry into Canada at Niagara Falls was dated December 24, 1926, and Greenfield is the first person to suggest that her name was something other than Alling. His letter to the newspaper was, of course, written some forty-four years after Lillian's arrest in Hazelton, which may account for the discrepancies. Three years after his letter to the
Province
, Greenfield wrote a book,
Drugs (Mostly)
, about his professional experiences and Lillian rated a mention in it as well. This time he said that “she wore a stout dress, heavy walking boots, a bulky winter overcoat and carried a small bundle wrapped in a kerchief.”
15
If this description is true, she had acquired this clothing since Constable Wyman first saw her on September 20, when she was inadequately clothed and wore running shoes. Greenfield's nephew, Harley Greenfield, remembers his uncle's stories about Lillian. “Uncle Ern had pretty mixed feelings about having to apprehend this lady, but she had no idea of the area or the territory,” said Harley. “This was a gritty woman. She was an amazing lady, a great hiker.”
16
Wyman's arrest report, dated September 24, 1927,
17
shows that Lillian was moved to Smithers, BC, and from there taken to Oakalla Prison in Burnaby, a suburb of Vancouver. According to journalist Donald Stainsby, Mrs. Bud (Isabelle) Dawson, who with her husband operated the Omineca Hotel in Hazelton, was sworn in as a special constable to escort Lillian there.
18
Greenfield, on the other hand, remembers Lillian being escorted to Oakalla by prison matron Constance Cox. According to the Hazelton newspaper, the
Omineca Herald
, when prisoners from Hazelton needed to be escorted to prison in the Lower Mainland, they were taken by train to Prince Rupert and travelled south from there by boat. In his book,
Drugs (Mostly),
Greenfield explained that he and William Service of the Provincial Police often took prisoners on the Canadian Pacific's SS
Prince Rupert,
19
so it is possible that Lillian was taken to Vancouver on the CP's
Princess Louise,
which left Prince Rupert on September 30, 1927, and arrived in Vancouver on October 2.
20
However, no passenger records exist for domestic travel,
21
and I found no mention of Lillian Alling's travels through Prince Rupert in the
Prince Rupert Daily News
or the
Evening Empire
newspaper for August, September or October 1927.
22
I have also been unable to locate any records of Lillian's time in Oakalla Prison. My requests to the British Columbia Archives revealed that they had “received several requests over the years for records concerning Lillian Alling. Our archival holdings were thoroughly searched but no such records were ever found.”
23
In 1927, when Lillian served her jail time in Oakalla, there was still no separate prison for women. She would have been placed in the general prison population, though the women and men spent the night in segregated cells.
24
It was a brutal life for anyone to endure, but Lillian, having spent so much time outdoors, must have found it a sad contrast to the freedom she had previously enjoyed. Although Greenfield stated in his 1973 letter to the
Province
he was convinced that “after five days had elapsed Lillian was released immediately,”
25
George Wyman said that:
At Oakalla Lillian Alling was considered a cooperative prisoner by the matrons and was liked by her fellow prisoners. She won her release on November 11, 1927. This was just ten days before her sentence was to expire.
26
After serving her sentence, Lillian appears to have spent the next six months or so in the Vancouver area, working, saving money, and biding her time until the travel conditions were favourable. By May 1928 she was on her way north again.
Oakalla Prison, which had opened in 1912, was run by the Provincial Gaol Services, a branch of the British Columbia Police Administration. BC's gaols had adopted the American “Auburn” Prison philosophy of hard work, strong discipline and silence. This system, which was developed at the Auburn prison in New York State, was predicated on the idea that criminal habits were learned and reinforced by contact with other criminals. Therefore, prisoners were subject to brutal discipline, forced to work in silence during the day and segregated in separate cells at night.
27
By 1927, Oakalla Prison had developed a particular reputation for harshness as Earl Andersen, author of
Hard Place to Do Time
, descibes:
By the end of the Roaring Twenties, lavishness and free-spirited prosperity prevailed in cities throughout North America, and Vancouver was certainly no exception. However, within the walls of Oakalla, only a few miles away in the tranquil suburb of Burnaby, conditions were still austere. The wardens maintained a tight rein of control over their prisoners.
28
Â
- (1)
Omineca Herald
, August 27, 1927. - (2)
Miller, Bill.
Wires in the Wilderness
. Victoria: Heritage House, 2004, page 205. - (3)
“Woodcock Remembers Siberian Girl and Telegraph Trail,”
Yellowhead / Stewart / Cassiar Times
, April 24, 1990. - (4)
He remained at Hazelton until January 1, 1929, when he was transferred to Smithers. He spent the years following in various provincial detachments, and in 1950, when the Provincial Police changed over to the RCMP, he was in Victoria at QuarterMaster Stores. - (5)
He was interviewed by Donald Stainsby for a
Vancouver Sun
article that was published April 27, 1963. At that time, Wyman was an inspector for the BC Liquor Control Board. Stainsby, Donald. “She Walked 6,000 Miles to the Top of the World,”
Vancouver Sun
, April 27, 1963.Wyman, quoted in Stainsby. - (6)
Wyman, quoted in Stainsby. - (7)
He died July 4, 1938, in Prince Rupert, two days after his forty-fifth birthday, from a gunshot wound from a .38 calibre revolver fired by American Mike Gurvich. Service had spent twenty-five years on the force. - (8)
Wyman, quoted in Stainsby. - (9)
Ibid. - (10)
Ibid. - (11)
Ibid. - (12)
Ibid. - (13)
Ibid. - (14)
Phone interview with Bill Kilpatrick, March 4, 2009. - (15)
Greenfield, T.E.E.
Drugs (Mostly)
. Meaford, Ontario: The Knight Press, 1976, page 11. - (16)
Telephone interview with Harley Greenfield of Meaford, Ontario, February 25, 2009. - (17)
Bennett, Martin L. “She Walked from New York to Russia,”
True Magazine
, November 1941. - (18)
Wyman, quoted in Stainsby. - (19)
Greenfield.
Drugs (Mostly)
, page 13. - (20)
Canadian Pacific Railway Company schedule for 1927, Alaska Service. Source: CP Archives. - (21)
Email from CP Archives, July 2, 2009. - (22)
Email from Kathleen Larking, Prince Rupert Public Library. - (23)
Letter received from Mac Culham, Manager, Corporate Information and Records, Royal BC Museum, February 24, 2009. - (24)
Andersen, Earl.
Hard Place to Do Time: The Story of Oakalla Prison: 1912â1991
. New Westminster: Hillpointe Publishing, 1993, page 46. - (25)
Koshevoy, Hymie. “More on Lillian Ailing,”
Vancouver Province
, May 2, 1973; also follow-up letter from T.E. Greenfield. - (26)
Wyman, quoted in Stainsby. - (27)
Andersen.
Hard Place to Do Time
, page 13. - (28)
Ibid., page 28.